The program will prepare graduates to:
Demonstrate highly developed critical
reading and writing skills.
- Write papers that show strong skills in critical expository
prose: narration, description, summary, paraphrase, and
quotation.
- Demonstrate ability to combine literary analysis with outside
authorities for support, evidence, or purposes of illustration or
refutation.
- Illustrate critical understanding of thesis, argument,
evidence, inference, tone, irony, connotation, denotation, and
metaphor.
Demonstrate understanding of the basics of
literary research.
- Conduct library research and use reference material in
different media: hardbound, microfilm, and computer.
- Search and use academic journals, both off-line and
on-line.
- Demonstrate knowledge of the unique demand of non-digital
historical and biographical research.
- Evaluate the merits of on-line research resources.
- Demonstrate skills in searching on-line research sources, such
as databases.
Demonstrate familiarity with major schools of literary criticism
and cultural theory.
- Correctly situate literary texts in appropriate critical or
theoretical contexts.
- Identify the various critical and theoretical approaches and
apply them to literary texts in papers and exams.
Demonstrate knowledge of the historical
frameworks of literary production.
- Demonstrate understanding of how different genres and literary
forms are affected by historical development.
- Apply appropriate critical questions to texts of a given
historical period.
- Demonstrate knowledge of the texts in the historical periods of
American and English literature, as well as in the expanded canon
of literatures written in English from across the globe.
Articulate and develop appropriate and
relevant contexts for the study of literature beyond historical
contexts.
- Demonstrate knowledge of the relationship of literature to
globalization and material culture.
- Demonstrate knowledge of the complexities of the artistic
process.
Demonstrate knowledge of literary study at
its most advanced levels.
- Work independently and originally on the topic chosen by the
professor for the seminar.
- Propose a research project that includes some mastery of the
relevant secondary and tertiary sources surrounding the topic.
- Write a long research paper that incorporates and integrates
the research into his/her own argument.
- Discuss research topics of his / her peers in a seminar
setting.